Database records sometimes use a unique identifier for storing, tracking, sorting, or analyzing each record. For instance, each time that a customer visits a site of a service provider and purchases an item via the site, the service provider or some other entity can assign a unique identifier to the purchase. The service provider then stores this unique identifier, which is now associated with the order, in a database. The identifier is then used to track the order as it progresses through the order's life, from the customer's initial request to purchase the item to the actual fulfillment of the order.
Additionally, the service provider or another entity stores this unique identifier in association with the order well after the order has been fulfilled, perhaps indefinitely. The service provider may leverage the knowledge of the order, as well as other orders, to glean important information about the service provider's business. This information may also be used in many other important and diverse ways, all of which are made possible by the originally-assigned unique identifier. While the assigning of unique identifiers is important in a customer order context, such identifiers are equally important in many other areas of database records.
In some traditional settings, a single entity has produced these unique identifiers one at a time and on an on-demand basis. For instance, when the service provider from above receives the request to purchase an item from the customer, the service provider typically asks the entity to generate and provide a single unique identifier. The entity then creates and sends this unique identifier to the service provider (or an agent of the service provider), who associates the identifier with the customer order. All this while, however, the customer who placed the order has been waiting for the site to process the customer's request to purchase the item. While the wait may only last on the order of a few seconds, decreasing this time generally leaves a far better impression on the customer and allows the customer to continue shopping on the site or otherwise continue with his or her day. Additionally, while the wait time may only be a matter of seconds for a single customer, this delay represents a very large aggregate delay for a service provider who services customers on a nation- or even world-wide scale. Additionally, if only a single entity is supplying the unique identifiers, the failure of this entity (or a broken communication connection to this entity) can cause an entire operation to shut down its operations during the outage.
Accordingly, there remains a need, among others, for generating and receiving unique identifiers for use in storing database records that address such concerns.